Dr. Sherene Razack

Biography

Sherene H. Razack is a Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. Her research and teaching focus on racial violence. She is the founder of the virtual research and teaching network the Racial Violence Hub (RVHub). Formerly a Distinguished Professor of Critical Race and Gender Studies in the Department of Social Justice, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (1991-2016), she relocated to the United States from Canada in 2016. Sherene H. Razack is of Caribbean (Trinidadian) origin.

Scholarly Profile

A feminist critical race scholar, Razack has published six single-authored books and three edited and co-edited collections, as well as over eighty journal articles and book chapters. Her publications illustrate the thematic areas and anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist scholarship she pursues.

Focus: Race, Gender and Disposability

Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (2015) explores state violence against Indigenous peoples. The book makes the argument that Indigenous peoples are a disposable population, incarcerated at ever increasing rates, dying in custody and living under conditions that express the settler state’s logic that such communities have no place in the modern. In settler societies, disposability is accomplished through the logic that Indigenous peoples cannot be killed since they are dying anyway. States achieve their sovereignty through the marking of certain groups as disposable. There are gender differences in patterns of disposability, however. Indigenous women find themselves treated as “wasted life” in circumstances involving sex (either forced or contracted for because they are presumed to be available for little else besides sexual consumption.

Focus: Anti-Muslim Racism

Nothing Has to Make Sense: Law, Global Anti-Muslim Racism and White Supremacy traces how white subjects and white nations consolidate their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim. Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism in the post 9/11 period: American collective memory of Abu Ghraib; a sentencing hearing at Guantanamo of Omar Khadr, the Canadian teenager detained since he was fifteen; bans on Muslim women’s clothing in Canada and Europe; and American evangelical Christian efforts to ban Islam in the school curriculum.  Arguing that nothing has to make sense in law when the subject is Muslim, this book maintains that legal sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and others in the West. Emphasizing the affective dimensions of anti-Muslim racism and the racial infrastructure along which anti-Muslim feelings circulate in the West, Razack offers insight into how whiteness is made, the networks, affinities and ideas on which it depends and the subjects it produces and sustains.

In Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (2008), through case studies of race and national security in Canada (a funded research project), the United States and Europe, Razack argues that the world today is increasingly governed by the logic of the exception where whole populations are abandoned and denied the benefit of the rule of law on the basis that they are a lower order of humanity that threatens the body politic.  Exploring the practices that define the contemporary securitized state, practices that include the suspension of rights for those suspected of involvement in terrorism, and the close monitoring, surveillance and detention of refugees and migrants in the West, the book focuses on the gendered dimensions of the War on Terror.

Focus: Imperialism, Torture and Terror

In Dark Threats and White Knights: Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (2004), Razack argues that the national mythology of peacekeeping enabled Canadians to consider themselves as the world’s humanitarians while at the same time it masked practices of exploitation and violence. This prize-winning book (American Association of Political Science, best book on race), shows how a racial logic has structured humanitarian intervention and highlights the military and racial masculinities on which such practices depend.

In At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour Theorize Terror (2014), an anthology co-edited with Suvendrini Perera, women of color scholars around the world reflect upon our own particular dilemmas in producing knowledge on the topic of terror. Our origins and histories and our racialized and gendered positioning in the Global North often connect us to places that are popularly conceived as the locus of terror. Connected in the popular imagination to spaces of terror in the global South, as academics in the Global North we nonetheless write from places seen as outside terror. We find ourselves confronted with the challenge of how to write about terror given our emotional and political stakes, our analytical understanding of patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy, our social positioning and our geographical location.

Focus: Sexual Violence, Race, Space and Citizenship

In in a prize winning, highly cited article (named best article for 2000 to 2002 in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society) on the murder of Pamela George, an Indigenous woman who was murdered by two white university students, Razack showed that it is through violence that white men come to know themselves as superior and in control, a practice the court sanctions through understanding sexual violence against Indigenous women as natural. Pamela George’s murderers were not held fully accountable for her brutal murder because she was considered to belong naturally to a space where violence occurs, and to have a body that is routinely violated. In exploring the connection between race, space and justice, Razack develops the theme of how the men’s identities (as young, elite, white, male university athletes) symbolically and materially required and depended upon gendered racial violence, a set of social arrangements that underpin contemporary settler colonialism.

In Unimaginable Fury: Contemporary White Settler Violence Towards Indigenous Women, Razack suggests it will be impossible to decolonize unless we begin to name and analyze the nature, function and extent of white men’s violence against Indigenous women in a settler colonial state. We need to understand how what is done to Indigenous women’s bodies supplies the settler and the settler state with power.  My project is to focus on white men’s violence towards Indigenous women not only for the reason that this violence is seldom explicitly named but because the omission is a dangerous one. We miss something very significant about the violence that is directed at Indigenous women by white men, whether that violence occurs in prostitution, policing, the justice system or in everyday street encounters. What we miss is the very core of how the colonial project is made, namely an aggressive, white masculinity, a self-making that is accomplished directly on the Indigenous woman’ body and given social and legal approval. If sexual violence is how you do colonialism, projects that stand a chance of undoing colonialism, of decolonizing, must surely pay considerable attention to the violence white men direct at Indigenous women.

Pursuing the connection between identity, race and space, the anthology Race, Space and The Law: Unmapping A White Settler Society (2004) spans critical geography, sociology, law, education, and critical race and feminist studies. Writers who share this terrain reject the idea that spaces, and the arrangement of bodies in them, emerge naturally over time. Instead, they look at how spaces are created and the role of law in shaping and supporting them. They expose hierarchies that emerge from, and in turn produce, oppressive spatial categories. The authors’ unmapping takes us through drinking establishments, parks, slums, classrooms, urban spaces of prostitution, parliaments, the main streets of cities, mosques, and the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders. Each example demonstrates that “place,” as a Manitoba Court of Appeal judge concluded after analyzing a section of the Indian Act, “becomes race.”

Focus: Interlocking Systems of Oppression

In Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (1998), (a book that received honorable mention as one of the ten best books in 1998 in North America and has been republished several times as well as in over two dozen lengthy journal articles), Razack traces the many ways in which sexual and racial violence against both Indigenous women and women of color disappear in the law into a story about national goodness. The work on racialized bodies and the law revealed an important feature of the law’s response to violence. Sexual and racial violence is often culturalized in law, that is, reduced to a cultural practice associated with racialized communities. Individuals come to participate in these processes through understanding themselves as members of more civilized communities and nations, as innocent and as the savior of women of color from their “barbaric” communities. Underpinning all of Razack’s work is a methodology that is based on the idea that systems of domination rely on each other. The idea of interlocking oppressions is one of her most important contributions to theory and practice and was first fully articulated in this book.

Focus: Critical Race Feminism

Critical race feminism, like critical race theory more broadly, interrogates questions about race and gender through an emancipatory lens, posing fundamental questions about the persistence if not magnification of race and the “color line” in the twenty-first century.

The contributors to States of Race (2010), co-edited with Malinda Smith and Sunera Thobani, “explore campus politics and the issues of equity, media circulations of ideas of a tolerant a tolerant multicultural and feminist Canada, security practices that confine people of colour to spaces of exception, Indigenous women’s navigation of both nationalism and feminism, Western feminist responses to the War on Terror, or the new forms of whiteness that persist in ideas about a post-racial world or in transnational movements for social justice  insist that we must study racialized power in all its gender and class dimensions. The contributors are all members of Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity.

In her first book, Razack explores the history of a Canadian legal feminist organization. In Canada, no organization has been more active in fighting the inequalities of the law than the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), a feminist advocacy group established to bring forward cases under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In a penetrating analysis of women’s rights before the law, Razack considers the history of LEAF and its work. She begins by exploring the language of rights in liberal theory and the impact of postmodernist thought. Razack then considers the role of women in the legal system, and how the law fails to address adequately the situation of women. She reviews the cases on which LEAF has focused, the legal issues involved, and the feminist principles which come into play. In total, she has compiled a compelling case study of legal advocacy with implications for all those struggling to create a more equitable body of law.